Secret 1

When you say your love to one, you think all at once of them on a very high rock. On another rock of matching height there is another you have said love to, like a brother or a chum. Below the rocks, lava looks instead like crunchy peanut butter. You are on a lower rock with the butter hot against it. With you is the devil, not the goatfaced angel, but the devil in a supermarket red devil cape that whistles like a bag. He says to you, ‘Choose the one you love most and they will be spared the fall from the rock. I’ll know if you are just choosing your mother because it is that you owe her. If you choose falsely I’ll drop both under.’ You choose. The devil has spooky patterns on his white tights. He says ‘Gotcha’ and instead drops the one you love most into the under. Then the other says ‘You chose them over me,’ and you say, ‘You’re welcome’.

 

 

Secret 2

When you meet a beautiful woman you feel as shy as an old sea captain with footskin on his palms. You leave your body in its nice top and eucalyptus balm. Grown stoutly graceful now, long in sea company, dry krill in the loose pouch of your mouth. You say ‘the legs, they go all the way up,’ ‘what’s a fresh young thing doing on this table of old surfdogs,’ eat up her lamb fat. You feel sentimental, but only as a kind of self-protection. You trick your own skin into thinking that she’s like your wife in youth, with the cute looks of a sugared apricot. You are stiff from deck nights and suggest that she might stoop to boogie with you. It’s a joke, though the yellow whites of your eyes are pleading.